ALL IN THE FAMILY

ALL IN THE FAMILY

CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES

With his fourth Lost Themes album, horror master John Carpenter gives CREEM an inside look at the family music business

J. Bennett

"Almost all directors are losers. We’d rather be rock gods.” That’s John Carpenter talking about his second career as a professional musician. “It’s much more fun than directing,” he says. “And you probably get more girls.”

Carpenter is 76 years old and happily married, so we’re pretty sure he’s not trolling for strange. But you can take this to the bank: John Carpenter does not want to talk about his movies. He certainly doesn’t want to watch them. But if you’re a child of the ’70s or ’80s—or anybody who enjoys horror and sci-fi flicks—there’s a good chance that one of Carpenter’s films is among your favorites.

He defined the slasher genre with 1978’s Halloween, simultaneously introducing the world to Jamie Lee Curtis and creating a franchise that spawned 13 films (and possibly more to come). Over the next decade, he directed a trio of flicks that made Kurt Russell a major action star and household name: Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

In 1983, he adapted Stephen King’s killer-car thriller Christine. An entire generation would never look at a Plymouth Fury the same way again. In 1987, he hired Alice Cooper to play a homeless prophet in Prince of Darkness, a movie about a liquid Satan trapped in a monastery. In 1988, he made They Live, the most politically salient film to ever star a professional wrestler (“Rowdy” Roddy Piper, R.I.P.), with the best line ever delivered vis-a-vis bubble gum and kicking ass.

As if that weren’t enough, Carpenter also directed 1980’s atmospheric and underrated The Fog (starring his then wife, Adrienne Barbeau, as a disc jockey who broadcasts from a lighthouse) and 1985’s Starman, which earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Somewhere in there, Carpenter even found time to do some gory reshoots for Halloween II, a film that was ostensibly directed by someone else.

By the end of the ’80s, few directors matched his output in terms of quality or quantity. And even fewer—zero, to be exact—consistently made music for their own movies. Carpenter wrote and recorded the scores for almost all his ’80s films, with the exceptions of The Thing and Starman. The pulsing synthesizer scores he created for The Fog, Escape From New York, and Halloween—especially Halloween, the gold standard of horror synth—have come to define pulsing synth scores. All attempts to create something similar are justifiably dubbed “Carpenter-esque."

Along with his son Cody and his godson Daniel Davies, Carpenter has taken his love of synth music out of the movies. In 2015, the trio unveiled their first Lost Themes album, a series of instrumental pieces— mostly synth, drums, bass, and Davies’ soaring electric guitar—that soundtracked Carpenter flicks that didn’t exist. Three more albums followed—2016’s Lost Themes II, 2021’s Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, and this year’s Lost Themes IV: Noir.

As the title implies, Noir was inspired by the famously dark Hollywood crime dramas of the ’40s and ’50s, flicks defined by cynical private investigators, desperate grifters, and sharp-tongued femmes fatales. The films were often populated by the A-list of the day: Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, Joan Crawford, et al. Carpenter and Davies had been watching these films on Turner Classics when the director was gifted a copy of a photo book called Noir Portraits.

“He got the book for Christmas,” Davies recalls. “I was going through it, and I asked him what his favorite noir films are. John is a film encyclopedia—he knows about all kinds of genres.”

Carpenter’s favorite noir? Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 masterpiece Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Released in the U.K. under the title Build My Gallows High, it’s widely considered one of the finest of the genre. Impossibly stylish and moody, critic Roger Ebert once called it “the greatest cigarette smoking movie of all time.”

“I thought we could make the album around noir films,” Davies explains. “I suggested that he could pick some titles and maybe that would spur some music or paint some imagery. It could be a looser or tighter connection, and it snowballed from there.’’

As such, the song titles on Noir are variations of noir film titles. Build My Gallows High became “Beyond the Gallows.” The 1948 Burt Lancaster/ Joan Fontaine thriller Kiss the Blood Off My Hands became “Kiss the Blood Off My Fingers.” He Walked by Night, a 1948 police procedural based on the reallife crime spree of WWII vet and ex-police employee Erwin “Machine Gun” Walker, became “He Walks by Night.” Et cetera, et cetera.

But Carpenter is quick to point out that the music on Noir wasn’t necessarily inspired by the films themselves. “I can’t make your movie for you,” he says. “You have to make it. Every single piece of music that we do, it conjures up all sorts of images—movie images. Action, darkness, beautiful women, beautiful women, beautiful women...”

TOO MUCH HORROR BUSINESS

John Carpenter’s office occupies a cozy house above Hollywood Boulevard. The living room features a Halloween pinball machine next to a life-size statue of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. (Carpenter says he’s often walked into another room and been startled by its presence upon his return. The same thing happens to CREEM.) An assistant is packing up merchandise based on Carpenter’s films—Michael Myers action figures, Big Trouble in Little China posters—all signed by the director. When we ask if the signed items are for a special occasion, Carpenter says, “Just money, which is always a special occasion.”

The mantelpiece displays some of his awards, including several from the horror mag Fangoria, all replicas of a chain saw embedded in a human skull. But for all the movie memorabilia around us, Carpenter hasn’t directed a feature since 201 O’s The Ward. Before that, it was 2001 s ill-received Ghosts of Mars, starring Ice Cube, Jason Statham, and blaxploitation queen Pam Grier. That one was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

“On Ghosts of Mars, we did a behind-the-scenes thing, and I saw myself in the recording studio working on the soundtrack,” Carpenter explains. “The stress on my face was just...I was exhausted and whacked out with tension. And I thought, ‘I don’t wanna do that anymore. I wanna stop now. I wanna rest.’ So, I did. And I’m glad I did."

It took several years before he felt good again. “I turned stuff down,” he says. “I didn’t do anything, and kinda hid. But I needed to. I realized I was addicted to directing movies. It was my muse. It was the first love of my life. But I had to stop for a while. It was just too much stress. I didn’t like my life. I didn’t like what it was turning into. So, I stopped and started to appreciate life more.”

Playing video games and watching basketball— especially his beloved Golden State Warriors—became his primary activities. “You know it, man,” he enthuses. “That was my survival.”

Carpenter was deep into his Hollywood wilderness period when his son Cody persuaded him to start making music again. “I wouldn’t have done it without him,” the director says. “I’m lazy. He dragged me kicking and screaming into this."

Cody’s version is slightly different. “It’s not so much that I convinced him, but rather we had been messing around with his new music gear at his studio in his house, recording and playing for fun,” he explains via email from Japan. “He had gotten a new music agent or music lawyer who asked him if he had any new music he was working on that he was interested in releasing, and ultimately the music that we had been making ended up becoming the first Lost Themes album.”

Over the past several years, Carpenter has become acutely aware that his fans want him to make another movie. His general response? Don’t hold your breath. “I love that people love my movies—some of my movies,” he says. “But you have to remember that pretty much every one of my movies was not wellreceived when they came out. Why would I make another movie unless you pay me a lot of money and make it easy on me? I don’t wanna work hard. I don’t wanna get up early in the morning."

Carpenter recently returned to the director’s chair under much more comfortable circumstances than he’s accustomed to. He directed an episode of his own Suburban Screams miniseries for Peacock in 2023, albeit remotely. The set was in Prague; Carpenter was in his living room. “I’m still directing,” he deadpans. “I’m just not making as many as I used to."

THE GODFATHER

At some point in the early ’90s, Kinks guitarist Dave Davies asked John Carpenter to become his son’s godfather. The two met after Davies wrote Carpenter a letter expressing his admiration for the director’s films. The pair hit it off, and Carpenter enlisted Davies to play guitar on the scores for his 1992 film In the Mouth of Madness and his 1995 remake of Village of the Damned.

The first John Carpenter movie that godson Daniel Davies saw was Prince of Darkness. “I think I was, like, 9 or 10,” he says. “It was the first time my parents left me by myself. I knew my dad had this basket of tapes that were all John’s movies, and I was not allowed to watch any of them. I remember the cover had a melting face on it, and it was like, ‘Let’s check this out!’ So, I just put that one in. It had a profound effect on me.”

Young Daniel started lighting fires. “I started throwing tissues into candles and watching them disintegrate and burn up,” he says. “I don’t know...the movie did something to me. And I was not allowed to be alone after that."

At the beginning of ninth grade—for reasons unrelated to mild pyromania—Daniel moved in with the Carpenters. What transpired was the arts education of a lifetime. “As I started getting older and playing music, we’d watch movies on the weekend, and we’d talk about them,” Davies recalls. “‘What is that movie about? What is the underlying theme? Why is it scary? Let’s turn off the music and watch it again.’ Everything from old, bad sci-fi movies to Kubrick films. We did that with music and with movies. It was like a private film school but also a bonding experience.”

“[music is] mucH moRE FUM THAH DIRECTING” CARPENTER SAYS. “AND YOU PROBABLY GET MORE GIRLS.”

There would be impromptu jam sessions during parties at the Carpenter house. Davies, Cody, John, and friends would rotate on keyboards, drums, guitar, and bass. “You’d just pick up an instrument and play,” Davies recalls. “I had my little book, so I was learning chords. Then I was back at my parents’ house for a while and getting some lessons from my dad. With John it was never like, 'Let’s sit down and learn something.’ It was more like, 'Do you know this Byrds song?’ I always want to improve as a musician, so I’d go sit next to him and ask, ‘How do you do that?”’

By his senior year, Davies was contributing to Carpenter’s soundtracks. In fact, both Davies and Cody performed on the score for Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires, a sort of neo-Western that sees James Woods leading a band of vampire hunters who are in league with the Vatican. “That was crazy,” Davies says. "I worked at the front desk at Cherokee Studios, where they were recording. They said, ‘Hey, can you go get your guitar from the house and play on this?’ I think I did one take just to kind of learn the song and they were like, ‘That’s perfect. Done!”’

Listening to the Lost Themes albums, it’s clear that both Davies and Cody are mindful of retaining Carpenter’s signature sound—the deep synth, the steady kick drum, the riff-based structures. “He has a certain feel, and we’re supporting him,” Davies offers. “Maybe it’s conscious, but when we’re making music, we don’t really think about it that much. Everything we do is just based on instinct. That’s really John’s philosophy: Don’t think about it too much. That’s what I try to remember. How does it feel? Where is it gonna lead you? When I think about his sound, that’s what I think about.”

“I try to always keep that ‘John Carpenter sound’ element in my mind when working with my dad,” Cody says. “The well is deep and fun to pull from, using familiar musical ideas in new and different situations.”

In addition to the Lost Themes albums, the trio rerecorded Carpenter’s movie themes for two anthology collections. They also did the scores for David Gordon Green’s latter-day Halloween trilogy— Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends—plus the 2022 reboot of Stephen King’s Firestarter. In this capacity, making music for other people’s movies, Carpenter describes himself as a “carpet composer.”

“Say you have a new house, and the floors are hard to walk on when you wake up in the morning, so you put carpets down for comfort,” he explains. “Well, I carpet your movie with music. I ease scenes. I can provide carpet for dialogue scenes to bring out what they’re saying. I’m there for romance, for horror, for whatever carpet you need underneath you.”

As of this writing, the trio are working on the score forthe upcoming dark comedy Death of a Unicorn, starring Jenny Ortega and Paul Rudd. “It’s a dark fantasy, a really interesting movie, so we changed our style a bit,” Carpenter explains. “The director, Alex Scharfman, calls it ‘cosmic.’ And it’s fun. We’re having a good time.”

“The movie itself has a very different feel from something like Halloween [2018] or Firestarter, and so the music also has a different feel as a result,” Cody adds. “The process has been the same, but the type of music we are making draws on slightly different influences to best fit the picture, while of course retaining that ‘John Carpenter sound.”’

SWITCHED ON

If you want to witness John Carpenter’s origin story as a director and composer, watch Forbidden Planet. Released in 1956, this sci-fi milestone stars Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielson, later of the slapstick Naked Gun films. Though never officially acknowledged as such, Forbidden Planet is believed to be a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It marks many firsts for sci-fi flicks—the first to have a faster-than-light starship, the first to feature a robot with a personality (Robby the Robot), the first to be entirely set on a planet orbiting another star.

Perhaps most significantly, Forbidden Planet is the first film of any genre to have an entirely electronic score. The composers, Bebe and Louis Barron, were a husband-and-wife duo from Minneapolis who designed and constmcted their own electronic circuits. Because they didn’t belong to Hollywood’s musicians’ union, their score for Forbidden Planet was credited as “electronic tonalities” rather than music. Their nonunion status also prevented their score from being considered for an Oscar, an award that it clearly deserved.

Carpenter saw the film when he was 8 years old. It made him want to become a director. “It was in color, and it was a science-fiction spectacular,” he marvels. “Robby the Robot and an invisible monster. What more do you want? And the musical score. I think probably that did it more than anything. They called it ‘electronic tonalities’ at the time, but it was electronic music, pure and simple. It was great.”

John Carpenter grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father was a music professor at Western Kentucky University. In addition to teaching at the college, his dad was an accomplished violinist who imparted his love of music to his son. He persuaded John to take up the violin as a kid, but it wasn’t a good fit. “I just didn’t care that much about it and didn’t have the innate talent that he did,” Carpenter says. “He really loved it. Classical music was never my thing, although I learned to love it. But my dad dragged me into music, for which I forever thank him.”

Carpenter switched to piano, then guitar and bass, eventually playing in a cover band that specialized in frat parties. “It did a lot for me watching these drunk frat guys—wow!” he recalls. “We made money doing these, and we took a lot of pride in what we did. But it was just a cover band. We played the popular songs of the time. We did things like [Jimi Hendrix’s] 'Purple Haze’ and tried to introduce a little psychedelia to Southern Kentucky, but man, people weren’t ready for that.”

His introduction to the synthesizer came via composer Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach, an album comprising synth renditions of Bach. It won three Grammy awards and became the second-ever classical album to go platinum. Carlos would go on to score Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

Carpenter isn’t a fan of A Clockwork Orange (the film, anyway), but Switched-On Bach stuck with him. “I thought, 'Wow, what’s that sound?’ There was an organ or harpsichord feel to it. And with so many tracks, I could sound like an orchestra. Or at least an approximation of one. I don’t know. There’s just something about the sound of a synth that appeals to me. It makes me wanna dance right now!”

As much as many of us would love to see Carpenter make another gem like Halloween or The Fog or Assault on Precinct 13, music is his main focus now. So, you know: Don’t hold your breath. “This is just a great art form,” he says. “The new stuff that Cody and Daniel and I have done, it’s a second career for me. It’s fabulous. The pressure’s less, the stress is less. The payday is a little less, but that’s okay. I get to work with my family.”